A tragic and shameful moment in French history continues to have consequences in the present day in this screen adaptation of the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. Julia Jarmond is a nwriter from the US living in Paris with her husband, Bertrand, an architect who is restoring a block of apartments in Paris owned by his family. Julia learns that Bertrand's family obtained the building through less than honorable means; the original owners were Jews who were forced to sell in the wake of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942, when the Nazi-affiliated Vichy government arrested over 13,000 Parisian Jews.